Culture of Death Watch
Apocalypto Now: Abortion and Human Sacrifice
in the Americas
by E. Michael Jones
Apocalypto is some indication of how far we have come in a very
short time. The base line for Mel Gibson could be The Patriot, produced
in 2000, which portrays America from the point of view of its beginnings in the
Enlightenment, as a nation of independent yeoman farmers, who, like the
character Gibson portrays, only go to war reluctantly, in defense of their
freedom, which is under attack by the brutal English. No one in his right mind
felt that America was a republic in any meaningful sense of the word in the
year 2000, but someone felt that the exercise in nostalgia that The Patriot
bespoke had some hortatory or moral value. Smithsonian did a cover story on it
historic factuality. It was a bit like conservatives claiming that they read
Burke and found him a relevant guide for our age. It was implausible but
possible, I suppose.
Apocalypto is an indication that “everything has changed,” as
the cliché used to go, in the wake of 9/11 or, for Gibson perhaps, in
the wake of The Passion of the Christ and the beating he took at the
hands of the Jews. Like Apocalypto, The Patriot is a revenge
movie. You kill my people, I kill yours. The scene of Mel unable to stop
hacking away at the Redcoat in The Patriot gives some indication that we
are talking about more than self-defense. The difference between Apocalypto and
The Patriot is that The Patriot has lots of ideology behind it,
which makes the revenge look less repugnant than it really is. Apocalypto is a
revenge movie with all of the ideological justification stripped away. The
Passion of the Christ was a deeply Catholic movie, but if Gibson’s other
movies are any indication of the hierarchy of values in his soul, Christianity
finishes a distant third or fourth in the values which he holds as important.
Value #1 is family, Value #2 is revenge, Value #3 is freedom of the American
patriot sort that sees the fulfillment of freedom as being left alone. After
all that, Christianity emerges as something that vaguely seconds all of these
emotions. The most significant thing that has happened between the 2000
premiere of The Patriot and the 2006 premiere of Apocalypto is
that Gibson’s illusions about America have disappeared. There is no longer an
America that can support Mel’s mythology, not even one which exists in his
mind. Mel Gibson’s America is like
Mel Gibson’s Catholic Church; neither is visible. The real Catholic Church
exists somewhere in Mel Gibson’s mind psychically next door to the real
America, which no longer finds expression in his movies.
America is no longer colonial South Carolina, where
yeoman farmers come together to forge a Republic based on their reading of
Roman and Greek classical literature and the Whiggery of John Locke. America is now the Mayan empire, the
land of the banner of the sun, whose people are favored by God and destined to
rule the earth. This becomes clear in a harangue given by the Mayan priest,
whose duty is to cut the hearts out of prisoners of war so that fertility can
return to a soil depleted by slash and burn farming. The priest’s rhetoric is a
combination of George W. Bush’s “you’re either for us or against us” speech and
a Bill Kristol article which could be found in any given issue of the Weekly
Standard. The neoconservative Mayan priest addresses his harangue to the
people Mel Gibson now portrays as the average American, a mob of besotted
drug-crazed NFL fans, whose main sporting event is capturing in nets the heads
of sacrificed prisoners of war as they bounce down the steps of the pyramid
temple where human sacrifice takes place. The main difference here is that in
modern American the sports fans paint themselves blue. In meso-America, this
honor was reserved for those who were about to have their hearts cut out. The primitive meso-Americans were hunter-gatherers,
like Jaguar Paw, the hero of Apocalypto, whose people get captured by
the advanced meso-Americans, who engage in slash and burn farming—and human
sacrifice when the soil gets depleted. Apocalypto is a movie about how
to survive in a culture based on human sacrifice.
The
modern American equivalent to Aztec and Mayan human sacrifice is, of course,
abortion. Mel Gibson, the visceral Catholic and father of seven children, is,
of course, viscerally opposed to abortion, as were the majority of Americans
until the Jews like Bernard Nathanson (who later repented) began their
campaigns (campaigns I have described in these pages, e.g., CW, June
2006) to get abortion legalized in New York and California. Other people have
noticed the connection between abortion in the United States and human
sacrifice in meso-America. I am one of those other people, at least that’s how
I came across to myself after reading an article I wrote in 1984 comparing the
Aztecs and the Democratic Party, both of whom were supportive of sodomy and
human sacrifice. In an article entitled “Religion and Politics American-Style,”
which appeared in the December 1984 issue of Fidelity, I claimed that
“Sodomy and human sacrifice were integral parts of public policy in America
before the arrival of Christianity. The devil ruled America with what must have
seemed like an unshakable grasp. It’s a tribute to the devil’s tenacity that he
has re-extended his grip after close to 500 years to include the majority party
of the most powerful country in this hemisphere.”
What
I find remarkable now is the fact that I somehow felt that the Republican Party
was against sodomy and human sacrifice. I felt this way in December 1984
largely because in November 1984 I had been invited to a White House conference
on, if not abortion, then certainly the moral issues which fell under the
emanations of the penumbra of the abortion issue. Can anyone in his right mind
imagine E. Michael Jones getting invited to a White House conference in 2006?
That I got invited to a White House conference then was even more remarkable
because of what it says about the White House than what it said about me. They,
in this instance, was Steve Galebach, who was as sincere in wanting to do
something about abortion as I was. Call us naive, but we both felt that the
Republicans in Reagan’s second term were going to do something about abortion.
Like Mel Gibson in his Patriot phase, we thought the American people had
some moral vision and that the Republican Party was going to act on it. Or, as
I said back then,
Try
to think of one founding father, one Puritan, or one contemporary of Lincoln
who could imagine the majority party in this country taking its cue from the
Aztecs and making sodomy and human sacrifice a part of its platform. That that
party went down to defeat [in the 1984 presidential elections] is a tribute to
the moral vision of the American people. That that platform ever got proposed
in the first place is a sign of how serious our troubles are and the magnitude
of the battle that yet needs to be fought.
Backing
me up in my contention—i.e., that the American people had a “moral vision” when
it came to abortion and that the Republican Party was going to do something
about it— was Thomas J. Ashcraft, then legislative assistant to Senator Jesse
Helms of North Carolina.
“My ultimate evaluation [of abortion],” Ashcraft told
me when I interviewed him in Senator Helms’ office, “is that in essence it’s
demonic because it’s a direct attack on the human race. It’s a direct attack on
God’s creation of individual human beings. Estimates now are that there are
over 50,000,000 surgical abortions a year in the world. Anybody who values
innocent human life because of the redemptive work of Our Lord and that He died
for every human being . . . I don’t think that you can look at it in any other
terms than being a very evil thing and the work of the demon. I think it’s
impossible to understand the abortion thing outside the terms of good and evil.
It’s as basic and as old as the human race.”
When,
I am tempted to ask, was the last time you heard a Republican politician or
staffer talk like that? Probably 1984,
which, it turns out was nowhere as Orwellian as the period which followed or
the language of the Republican Party since that time. Was I naive? Were we? In
a sense we were. The abortion issue was over by the end of the second year of
Reagan’s first term, when the right to life movement split down the middle. The
bishops and National Right to Life endorsed the Hatch amendment. The
hard-liners endorsed Senator Helms’ bill. In the end, neither passed. President
Reagan then consigned the issue to the realm of “benign neglect,” to
appropriate the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s term for Nixon’s
attitude toward the Civil Rights movement. On the other hand, even if we were
naïve, I still think Tom Ashcraft believed what he said, as did Senator Helms.
Unfortunately,
they were replaced with people who did not, and their name is Legion. So Legion
in fact, one hardly knows where to begin. Shall we begin with the fact that
this (the winter of 1984-5) was the time when Irving Kristol protégé Michael
Joyce became head of the Bradley Foundation and the neoconservatives began
their triumphal if subversive march through conservative institutions? What
followed was a parade of thugs, liars, and prostitutes— all of whom were every
bit as determined to preserve the hegemony of human sacrifice in American
culture as the Democrats, but whose only distinction was that they were more
duplicitous than the Democrats. As I said, their name is Legion, but I’m
thinking in particular of people like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who came
to power in 1994 and told the prolife movement they would have to wait a bit
because tax breaks for the rich were more pressing than saving the lives of the
unborn.
And
then, two years later, there was Bob Dole and Ralph Reed, the man who made him
the Republican nominee against the incumbent Clinton by destroying Pat
Buchanan’s campaign in South Carolina. At the time, I thought Ralph Reed was
working for Pat Robertson, who was certainly vociferous in his opposition to
abortion. It turns out however, that I was naïve again, something I learned
from Murray Friedman’s book The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish
Intellectuals and American Foreign Policy.
Unlike
Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, who gave the impression that he
would rather handle snakes at a church service in east Kentucky than talk with
people like Abe Foxman, Ralph Reed, the head of the Christian coalition, grew
up in Miami, in what he described as a “Jewish atmosphere” (all subsequent
quotes on Reed are taken from Friedman’s book). To the uninitiated, Ralph Reed
appeared to be the protégé of televangelist Pat Robertson. Their theologies
were the same, which is to say, politically identical with Jerry Falwell’s
dispensationalism, which saw the Jews as God’s chosen people and the state of
Israel as divinely willed by God.
In
reality, however, Ralph Reed was the protégé of Jack Abramoff, the Washington
lobbyist who would go to jail in the early 21st century for influence peddling.
Reed was to the evangelicals what Bill Buckley had been to an earlier
generation of Catholics. Abramoff, an orthodox Jew whom Friedman describes as
having been a “conservative firebrand at Brandeis University” not only gave
Reed his first job in Washington when he hired him as a political intern in
1981, he also invited Reed to live in his home, where he presumably ate off of
a separate set of dishes,
“attended services with him, and introduced Abramoff to his wife, who
came from Georgia.” Abramoff found Reed “incredibly philo-Semitic,” and Reed
reciprocated by dealing harshly with anti-Semitism whenever it reared its ugly
head among the College Republicans. In 1983 Reed succeeded Abramoff as
executive director of the National College Republicans. Like William Buckley
before him, “Reed used his influence to prevent the more extreme elements
within the conservative movement from taking over the GOP.” Like Buckley, Reed
invariably consulted a Jewish calculus when determining which elements were to
be denominated “extreme.”
When
the ADL shot itself in the foot by attacking the Christian Right, Israel’s most
faithful allies in America, it was Ralph Reed who played the role of healer,
addressing the ADL’s national leadership on April 3, 1995. Having gone to
school with Jack Abramoff, Reed told the ADL that “the Christian Coalition
believes in a nation that is not officially Christian,” and as such it was
against school prayer—a statement which reportedly infuriated Reed’s ostensible
mentor Pat Robertson. Reed went on to say the same thing to the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) one month later, prompting Elliott Abrams, who
attended the AIPAC meeting, to exclaim that Jews “need Ralph Reed.”
Reed
showed the neocons just how much they needed him when he derailed Pat
Buchanan’s second presidential bid by throwing Christian Coalition support
behind Senator Bob Dole in the 1996 South Carolina Republican primary.
Buchanan’s loss in South Carolina took the steam out of his campaign. Deprived
of what was in many ways one of his natural constituencies by Reed’s effort,
Buchanan’s political movement simply evaporated, to the point where he lacked
the political clout even to address the 1996 convention. Friedman credits Reed
with “the modernization of Christian conservatism.” Given Yuri Slezkine’s understanding
of modernity, this would mean aligning Evangelical votes to Jewish interests,
which is precisely how Friedman interprets Reed’s role in the South Carolina
primary:
Buchanan’s
George Wallace-like populism, his isolationism, and his attacks on neocons for
their strong support of Israel outraged Jews; his isolationism also turned off
mainstream conservatives. Quietly, Reed threw the weight of the Christian
Coalition behind moderate Senator Bob Dole in the crucial South Carolina
primary. Buchanan’s loss there dealt a fatal blow to his campaign, and Reed was
widely credited with causing his defeat.
When
Ralph Reed left the Christian Coalition saddled in debt to become a “lobbyist,”
he returned to his roots by linking up with Jack Abramoff, playing Indian
tribes off against each other in their efforts to start gambling casinos and
profiting handsomely from his role as a double agent. In 2002, Reed, who by
then had become a political consultant in Atlanta and chairman of the Georgia
Republican Party, joined Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein in forming “a sort of Christian
AIPAC.” On May 2, 2003, the ADL took out an ad in the New York Times, in which
Reed hailed the Jewish state’s continued survival as “proof of God’s
sovereignty.”
To
be fair to William F. Buckley, he once criticized the ADL for giving an award
to Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner. Because of their idiosyncratic
theology, Reed and the dispensationalists couldn’t even muster that sort of
token opposition to the ADL, prompting ADL director Foxman, whose organization
had denounced Reed and his followers as hatemongers, to announce, “I am proud to have Ralph Reed as a friend and
as an advocate on Israel.”
Abortion
If
there is one group responsible for the abandonment of abortion as an issue among
conservatives and Republicans, it is the Jewish Messianic sect of Trotskyites
known as neoconservatives. When the term finally emerged as a word in general
political parlance, Max Boot wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal
in which he admitted that neoconservatives had never felt that abortion was an
important issue, compared, say, with the continued survival and US tax-funded
well-being of Israel. Jews like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and their
offspring subverted the word conservative in a way that ensured that in the end
more people who die because the Republican Party under their tutelage abandoned
abortion as an issue in any real sense and got that party to embark upon a
series of disastrous wars in the Middle East.
All
of this was far over the temporal horizon in 1984. This is how the issue looked
to me in 1984:
After a few days in Washington one comes away with
the sense that winning the election was simply a way of continuing the battle.
If Reagan had lost, if Helms had lost, there would be virtually no battle on
the social issues.
At the heart of the issue stands Mr. Reagan himself and the staffing decisions he will make for his second term. According to one White House aide, choosing William Clark as Chief of Staff would signal a victory for prolife forces. The choice of Michael Deaver would be “a disaster.” The choice of James Baker or Drew Lewis would reaffirm the status quo.
Deaver
was, of course, chosen as Reagan’s chief of staff, and disaster, of course,
followed, but not in a way that I or the anonymous staffer could have predicted
then. As one more indication of just how far we have come, two days before the
premiere of Apocalypto, James Baker reemerged into the public spotlight
when he issued the report of the Iraq Study Group. In that report, Baker and a
bipartisan group of WASPs claimed that the neocon War in Iraq was the gravest
danger the Republic had faced in the history of his involvement in public life.
Once again the consigliere of the Bush family had to rescue Dubya from the
consequences of his own stupidity and imprudence. Only this time the issue was
more serious than one more DUI arrest. This time it looked as if the whole
empire was going to go down the drain because the Jews, who were conspicuous by
their absence from the ranks of the Iraq Study Group, had used Dubya to get
America involved in what was now an obviously unwinnable war in Iraq. For his pains, Baker was denounced as
an anti-Semite by Rush Limbaugh, who could have put in a cameo role in Apocalypto
as one of the drug-crazed Mayans cheering on the blood-spattered priest talking
about the destiny of the doomed people of the banner of the sun.
Doom,
in fact, is the feeling that suffuses both Apocalypto and the country
which went to see it. As Jaguar’s Paw and his fellow captives are being marched
through the wasteland that slash and burn cultures have to create to survive, a
young girl afflicted with a fatal disease prophecies doom for the land of the
banner of the sun. Montezuma, the ruler of the Aztecs, was afflicted with a
similar feeling of foreboding. He had heard that white gods were going to
travel to Mexico from across the sea and destroy his kingdom. Mel Gibson must
have heard of the prophecy because that is how Apocalypto ends.
After
being saved from being sacrificed on the pyramid by an eclipse of the sun,
Jaguar Paw escapes into the jungle and hurries home to save his pregnant wife.
For the last hour of the movie, we watch him outrun and eventually kill all but
two of his pursuers. They finally catch up to Jaguar’s Paw on the beach and are
about to bash his brains in with their obsidian maces when the deus ex
machina appears. The Deus in question is Christ, and the machina is the
Spanish Galleons which brought both Conquistadors like Hernando Cortes and
Franciscan monks like Fray Bartolomeo de Diaz to the New World.
At
this point, the message of Apocalypto becomes clear: America has become
so corrupt, largely because of the institutionalization of abortion/human
sacrifice, that it can no longer be reformed from within. The days of the Patriot
are over; the American experiment in ordered liberty has failed because liberty
was redefined as sexual license, and sexual license requires abortion/human
sacrifice as its guarantee. Mayan/Aztec culture was too corrupt to be reformed
from within; it had to be swept away by the sword before a true meso-American
culture could flourish in its place, and that culture, so Gibson seems to be
saying, can only flourish under the sign of the cross. We need the deus ex
machina to bring down the curtain on this play.
At
this point in the film, the message becomes less clear. Jaguar Paw’s two
pursuers step toward the Spaniards, but Jaguar Paw himself retreats back into
the jungle. If he wanted a film with an unambiguously Christian ending, Gibson
should have had the three Indians, formerly at each others’ throats, now
reconciled to each other, kneeling in front of the cross. That is, in fact,
what happened in the aftermath of Cortes’s conquest of Mexico, largely as a
result of the miraculous appearance of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. This is how I
portrayed that event in 1984:
Cortes sued for peace numerous times during his siege
of Tenochtitlan, but in the end found that the devil-god Huitzilopochtli had
become so accustomed to human blood that he would rather see the Aztec capital
destroyed than relinquish his grasp on it. Washington is not Tenochtitlan, but
after spending a few days there, one comes away with the impression that the
battle over human sacrifice in our day will be every bit as protracted.
Having
seen the movie, I can’t decide whether Mel Gibson read my article or not. The
idea isn’t all that farfetched, certainly not as farfetched as the idea of E.
Michael Jones getting invited to a White House conference. One of the people
who was impressed with the article at the time was none other than soon-to-be
presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who cited my article in one of his
syndicated columns. “The other day,” Pat wrote in a syndicated column which
appeared in the January 23, 1985 issue of The Washington Times—right
around the time of the Washington Right to Life March, “Fidelity, a new
magazine put out by traditionalist Catholics, almost all of whom are scholars,
priests, or doctors arrived. The lead editorial drew comparisons between the
Aztec civilization Cortes discovered and the America of 1985.” Both Pat and I
agreed at the time that “the Democratic Party is possessed by the devil”
because of its support of sodomy and human sacrifice. Both of us thought that
the Republicans believed in something better. Now the Republicans have gone
down to defeat much as the Democrats did in 1984, and it looks as if they are
going to drag the prolife movement with them because of a quarter of a century
of hypocrisy, mendacity, and duplicity in their dealings with the constituency
who thought they were going to put an end to human sacrifice in America. Either
way—through Fidelity or through Pat’s column—the association between
Washington and Tenochtitlan, as well as the association between human sacrifice
and abortion escaped into the ether of public discourse.
Mel
Gibson now seems to be disagreeing with me. Apocalypto’s message is
pretty clear in this regard. Washington is Tenochtitlan in Mel Gibson’s mind.
I, however, remain by my original assertion: I still claim that Washington is
not Tenochtitlan; Washington is now far worse than Tenochtitlan. Who are we, I
found myself wondering at the end of the movie, to badmouth the Aztecs and
Mayans, who may have marched thousands of captives up their pyramids and cut
out their still-beating hearts, but in the end murdered in the course of a
century only a fraction of the children we slaughter every year? Only a
neoconservative—like Max Boot or Bill Kristol or David Frum—who was in the grip
of the most arrant Messianic fever could look at America and still see the
Puritan “city on a hill,” and they can only do that by assiduously ignoring the
abortion issue and focusing instead on the failed Messianic state of Israel as
their model. A Catholic can’t look at the Aztecs or the Mayans and their
penchant for human sacrifice and not think of the United States by way of
comparison. That is why Steven Spielberg never could have made this movie.
And yet, for all of its visceral Catholicism, Apocalypto ends on a note of ambivalence, one that must mirror Mel Gibson’s ambivalence about both America and the Catholic Church. If Mel Gibson really wanted to infuriate the Jews who savaged him over The Passion of the Christ, he should have had the three Indians kneel down in front of the cross, reconciled to each other by Christ’s saving love. Instead, Gibson has the hero of the film retreat back into the woods with his wife. As if to underline his ambivalence, Gibson has Jaguar Paw’s wife ask—with the Spanish Galleons in the background—, “Should we go to them?” “No,” he responds, “Our place is in the forest.”
So
after starting off with a Catholic ending to his film, Gibson reverts to the
old American and turns Jaguar’s Paw into the meso-American version of Huck
Finn, who ends up by lighting out for the territories, because Aunt Sally (or
the Catholic Church) “is going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand
it. I been there before.”
Well, haven’t we all? Or have we? Mel Gibson doesn’t
want to be “sivilized.” He prefers revenge over forgiveness, even if the
failure of the American experiment has deprived him of an ideological
justification for his revenge. In
the end, Mel Gibson is ambivalent about both America and the Catholic Church.
He prefers to worship in a Church that is not visible and live in an America
that is as fictitious as the one portrayed in The Patriot. The one thing
that the United States has never been is Catholic. It remains, as a result, to
see which deus ex machina arrives on its shores to save it from itself.
Will the meek—i.e., the Mexicans—inherit the earth? They will—pace, Pat—if we’re lucky.
E.
Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars.
This review was
published in the February 2007 issue of Culture
Wars.
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